John Updike on Mo Yan

When a non-Anglophone writer wins the Nobel Prize in Literature, as Mo Yan, the Chinese novelist, did this morning, it’s natural to seek out points of comparison closer to home: Mo has been compared to Kafka, for example, and the Nobel Committee has cited the way his “hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history, and the contemporary.” That certainly sounds familiar and Kafka-esque—but, to the extent that it does, it’s probably misleading.

In his 2005 review for The New Yorker of Mo’s novel “Big Breasts and Wide Hips,” John Updike was struck by the unique mix of “brutal incident, magic realism, nature description, and far-flung metaphor” in Mo’s work, and by the wry, freewheeling forthrightness of the prose. “The Chinese novel, perhaps,” he writes, “had no Victorian heyday to teach it decorum,” giving Mo the freedom to craft “indulgent and hyperactive metaphors” like these:

Pastor Malory flung himself off the bell tower and plummeted like a gigantic bird with broken wings, splattering his brains like so much bird shit when he hit the street below.
A full-bodied girl to my right had a tender, yellow budlike extra finger outside the thumb of each hand … and those darling little extra digits fluttered over her face like the curly tails of little piglets.

Mo Yan was born Guan Moye, in 1955, into a rural family in northern China; his pen name means “don’t speak.” He has published prolifically in Mandarin, and a number of his novels and short-story collections have been translated into English by Howard Goldblatt, beginning with the novel “Red Sorghum,” in 1993 (which was also made into a film by the Chinese director Zhang Yimou), and most recently with “Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out,” in 2008.

“Big Breasts and Wide Hips,” Updike writes, combines two stories you wouldn’t ordinarily stick together. First, Mo manages to retell the history of China in the twentieth century through the life of one “indestructible woman,” Shangguan Lu, who outlives “her eight daughters, the various men who have fathered them, her sterile husband, her ferocious mother-in-law, her fellow-villagers in Northeast Gaomi Township—all, with a few exceptions, perish in the waves of war, famine, and Communist enforcement that bathe this hapless land in suffering.” Then, at the same time, Mo tells the story of her son, Shangguan Jintong, the only child who outlives her. For his whole life, Mo writes, he basked in the “glorious tradition of Shangguan women, with big breasts and wide hips.” He is obsessed with breasts and breast-feeding, which Mo describes with an extraordinary vividness:

She stuck the white doves up under my nose, and I urgently, cruelly grabbed one of their heads with my lips. Big as my mouth was, I wished it were bigger still…. I had one of them in my mouth and was grasping the other in my hands. It was a little red-eyed white rabbit, and when I pinched its ear, I felt its frantic heartbeat.

“So impressive and ardent are Jintong’s evocations of nursing’s primal pleasure,” Updike admits, “that this reader was slow to realize that Mo Yan intended our hero to be not a healthily typical male but a case of arrested development.” But it’s comedy, he concludes, with a rough edge of accusation: evidence, Updike writes, that “bad societies offer no incentive to grow up.”

Joshua Rothman is the magazine’s Archives Editor.

Photograph by Ulf Andersen/Getty.

Joshua Rothman is The New Yorker’s archive editor. He is also a frequent contributor to newyorker.com, where he writes about books and ideas.